Time is what we live with, and inside of, every second of our lives—and yet it is so far from us, so mysterious, so poorly understood. What is time? How should we think about it?
Time is almost this godlike force, determining everything, measuring everything, and yet it has no real integrity of its own. It’s like water—metaphysical water. Time can be turned into other things so easily. Time is money, after all. It seems to me that anything that can be turned so easily into money is an inherently satanic thing.
Time always gets away from you—you can get distracted and all of a sudden 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, have gone by; and you have nothing to show for it. And even this thought—that you need to have something to show for your time—is strange; as if time ticking away without you doing something is somehow bad; a waste. Time can be wasted so easily—we have to constantly scramble to figure out ways to not waste time. And this is especially vexing because time seems to want to be wasted, doesn’t it?
Einstein showed us that space and time are one thing—spacetime—and yet time seems very different than space. Space can’t really be wasted in the same way that time can be. You can call someone a “waste of space” as an insult—and it’s a really bad insult, because space is such a hard thing to waste; you must be a real dumbass to be a waste of space! It also implies that space is very valuable—which it is!—and that you have done something very bad indeed by wasting it.
Space is also the thing that mankind has most often gone to war over—most wars are space wars, wars of territory, and wars for resources, which are located in different territories, which is why you invade. Wars of invasion and conquest are about adding space to your own nation. Most war is a war of space—space war.
In the near future, wars will be about outer space—it’s already happening now, getting satellites in orbit to be used for military means, and setting up bases on the Moon, and so on. It’s hard to imagine any of this in relation to time—what would a time war be? Maybe I’ll write about that in a future post…
Space is part of the world, and no more space is ever really created—but also it doesn’t really slip away. Space is there (except for the polar ice caps, which are melting away). That’s why it’s so valuable. Time is kind of different—every second that goes by is replaced with a new second; we are always getting more time; this is why we are so often bored.
Boredom is a feeling that exists in relation to time—the feeling of having too much time on your hands. We wouldn’t really feel that way with space—even if you have more space in your home or apartment than you need, it wouldn’t be a bad feeling necessarily; you could do whatever you want with it, or nothing with it, and you wouldn’t feel like you are wasting time, or bored. What would be the spatial equivalent of boredom?
Time has this feature to it of never being quite right—we have to plan and struggle really hard to feel like we have used time correctly. With space this isn’t really the case—space is just kind of there, we can do what we want with it, when we want to, without quite as much pressure.
Space is real in a way that time really isn’t—we can move around in space, we can move forwards and backwards in it; we can buy space to live in; we walk through space; we can design space, decorate space, live in a space, share a space. You can do almost anything you can imagine with space. Time doesn’t really open itself up in this same way—you can’t move forwards or backwards in it; that would be time travel, which will probably never be possible. Space is part of the world, as is time, but space is more solidly part of the world, it seems. We can walk back and forth through space as easily as anything—but this basic think is unthinkable through time.
Time is part of the world, and yet it always slips away—time ticks. Space doesn’t do anything like ticking. What would be the spatial equivalent of ticking? I can’t think of anything.
It seems that time, despite its prominent role in the world and in life, is an illusion—this is a familiar enough idea. I think this is what Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence of the same means—that everything eternally repeats, that history isn’t going anywhere, the arrow of time doesn’t point forward (or even backward). The arrow of time points only at itself. It’s all just an illusion—nothing is ticking away.
How should we think of time? Just as one long moment? That’s how we think of space—just one big thing. The world is one big space, but it’s cut up into different pieces—but these areas are basically illusions; it’s all just one big world, one big space.
Time is the same—one big moment that gets sliced up into different little fragments, called seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc.
These temporal divisions are just as illusory as the divisions in space—states, countries, etc. The world is one thing—made up of space and time—and it was made by God; so nothing that God made can tick away; thinking of time as something that goes forward, or as something that can vanish, or that has a history, seems very satanic.
If God made it then it can’t change or leave—so time must not have this quality. It’s too deeply embedded into the nature of the world to ever really go away—this must be what Nietzsche means by the “eternal recurrence of the same.” (This is also the kind of logic that hermetic philosophy uses to explain the existence of evil—God doesn’t simply remove evil from the world, because it is too deeply part of the world, and that would be like cutting off a piece of the body).
Thinking of time as anything that passes away is wrong because time is part of the world, and the world was made complete and perfect in itself—time is a core part of it, and it always remains. And if time does pass, it passes in a way that brings the past back to the present always—everything that passes away returns, or recurs, eternally. Thinking about time any other way—the past being lost to time, time being wasted or ticking away—makes no sense. Where would time go? It has nowhere to go—it can only be in this world, and this world is a united whole.
Time is what we live with, and live inside of, every second of our lives—and yet we don’t really feel at home with it; it feels like we owe something to it, like we aren’t quite sure how to coexist with it. A strange way to feel about something that should be our home! We don’t feel quite this way about space—we know what to do with space; we just need a little bit of it and then we’re fine. But with time it’s never quite enough; we can never quite live comfortably within it; or at least, it takes a lot of effort and wisdom to be able to do it. Anyone can live in a space easily, but few can live within time with any comfort or ease.
Time is the negative complement of space; space is easy, natural, open, secure, safe—time is difficult, estranging, surreal, closed, always falling away out of our grasp. The world was made through combining all kinds of opposites—good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and on and on—and space and time are the material instances of this; the basic duality that all others come from.
resources are time x space, space wars are time wars. & i think the theory is that time is a phenomena of consciousness, so death could be a war/theft of time.